


Baseball and Mutant Antics

by secretlyasummers



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Baseball, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-04 02:45:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14583210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/secretlyasummers/pseuds/secretlyasummers
Summary: Scott, Rachel, and Nathan spend some time together. Don't they need it, really?





	Baseball and Mutant Antics

**Author's Note:**

> Set sometime after the end of Morrison's New X-Men.

Ambush is an unfair word, but ambush it was. Rachel had convinced Sage to change the Danger Room schedule to put Cyclops’ session while Emma was in New York, and then just lurked at the door until Cyclops came. She started as he opened the Danger Room door.

“Scott! Scott, wait.” Rachel regretted saying the words even then, but she had committed. “Are-are you free? Just now, I mean. Other than this, I mean. And X-Men stuff.”

“What?” Cyclops paused in his tracks. “Rachel. Yes?”

“I have, I mean, for Mom, and for – from me, sometime, I thought, that we, maybe, could –"

Scott leaned on the wall, still ramrod straight but his body language just slightly more relaxed. “Say it, sweetheart.”

“Before – for your birthday. I got baseball tickets. Three of them. For you, and Jean, and, and me. And – she isn’t here, of course, you know, with us, but I hoped . . . if you want.”

Scott stood up. “You want me to go with you to a baseball game?”

Rachel brushed her skirt nervously. “With Nathan Christopher. I invited him. Too. If you want. Or just you two, I don’t have to go with you. To the Mariners. My Scott – my dad – he was – he liked it.”

“No, no!” Scott raised his hands, halting her. “I would. You – you don’t have to hesitate, so much. I’d love to. Nate too. I’ll make some excuses for Emma. Is – is he doing well? Nathan?”

Rachel brightened. Visibly. Literally, she glowed, the Phoenix doing its work. “Oh, um, yeah! We talk – telepathically – sometime. He’s working with Deadpool. In the South Pacific.”

“That’s good.”

The two stood, silent, the moment hanging in the air.

“I-

“My—”

Scott chuckled and Rachel smiled, slightly.

“Go ahead, Dad. Scott.”

“My dad – Corsair – he had season tickets, back in the day. He’d fly Alex and I down from Anchorage.”

She didn’t quite know what to say and let the moment pass. “My Scott, he told me something similar.” She paused. “It’s Tuesday – Tuesday evening. Against the Astros. Nathan Christopher – he’s going to meet us there, but you and I, we could take a Blackbird, or convince one of the teleporters, I guess.”

“I’ll speak to Pixie.” Scott pushed open the Danger Room door, clearly finished with the conversation. “Thank you.”

“Yeah. I—” She paused, as the door slammed shut.

The next couple days passed as a relative blur to them both. To Scott, less because of the expectation and more because _any_ day that passed without a sentinel attack or a rogue time traveler or something along those lines passed as such. (That is the life of a paramilitary superhero running a high school.)

Despite the . . . advice . . . of her friends, Rachel was honestly excited.

(Betsy’s words were the most amusing, at the least. “Having known both your father and brother in the biblical sense, I have to imagine that one or the other will create some excuse to avoid going to whatever barbarity that you Americans call sports.”)

But ever since Cable had rescued her from the timestream, and despite one attempt at college, it had been an almost eternal stream of kidnappings and lizard people and the like. Normality was nice. Reassuring.

\------

Pixie dropped them off in a blind alley a couple of blocks from the stadium. Scott had dug out a ball cap he had gotten from his grandparents, and Rachel had bought a jersey off the internet. Once the light from the teleportation portal had faded, and ruby quartz glasses aside, they appeared to be . . . normal. Mundane.

“Where are we meeting Nathan Christopher, Rachel?” Scott moved with a soldier or spy’s walk, his eye sweeping the crowds, watching for packages that could be weapons or bombs, or people moving in suspicious groups. It was the type of gaze that was well-suited to detecting Skrull duplicates or holo-Sentinels, but not for anything that would even vaguely be defined as fun.

“He said he’d find us. I think he finds it amusing, to do tracking, but powerless. I can . . .” she raised her hand to her head, in the apparently universally recognized symbol for telepathy, “. . . if you’d like?”

“No. It’s fine.” Cyclops looked across the crowd, craning his head. “If Cable said he’d find us, he’ll find us.” They meandered their way towards the turnstiles, mostly in a sort of quasi-awkward silence. Not quite knowing what to say in most situations is a hereditary Summers family trait.

“Do you want food? A snack?” Scott blurted the words out.

“Shouldn’t we wait until we’re . . . inside, the stadium?”

Scott gestured towards the street vendors that dotted the pavilion outside the stadium entrance. “They’re cheaper, and for snacks it’s easier to bring our own. I don’t think Nathan would bring his own.”

“I don’t know, those pouches have to be for something.” Rachel snickered. “Ammunition in one, some crackers in the next . . .” She shrugged. “There are worse explanations!”

“I suppose.”

“But I would take some peanuts.”

Scott nodded. “Right. Come on.” He reached for his wallet and handed a few dollars to the vendor. “Water, too?”

Rachel shook her head.

“Sure.” Scott handed her a bag and opened another of his own. “If our seats were closer to the baseline, we’d save some shells to throw at the other team’s players.”

“Really?”

Scott had a bit of a half-smile, as they merged back into the flow of the crowd, making their way towards the turnstiles. “Well, Alex did. Dad didn’t love it, and we got some dirty looks. But Alex was throwing shells at Dad all the way back to Anchorage.”

Rachel laughed, and took Scott’s hand. “I can’t believe that. I’d have thought he’d be droning on about rocks or how we should just ‘call him Alex’ from birth.”

Scott half-turned his head as they walked. “You didn’t spend a lot of time with your Alex, I guess?”

“Nah.” She shook her head. “He was living out west with Aunt Lorna. Until the Sentinels.”

“Oh.” Scott let the moment drop, not quite sure what to say.

“Don’t. It’s – it’s not a big deal. I don’t want to be weird about it.” Rachel squeezed her dad’s hand. “I’m not the only dystopian future time-traveler, at least not any more. I’m trying to get over it.”

Scott blinked. “Oh.”

They walked in silence, for a little bit. “When Jean and I started dating, while the Professor was playing dead, Warren told me that I should take her to a ball game. So, I did, but –"

“-but it was a Mets game and the Greys were a Yankees family.” Rachel smiled apologetically. “Sorry. Same thing happened with my version of you and Mom.”

“Rachel, you’re going through my very limited set of baseball stories.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“They aren’t usually very good to begin with. Um. Once, Rogue went after a fly ball that someone – Peter, I think – hit, and went off to get it, and ended up—”

“Flirting with the President. Betsy told me.”

Scott had a tight smile. “For the record, I do have a plan if a baseball comes towards the Blackbird.”

“Of course you do, Dad.” Their conversation was interrupted by a new voice.

“Nathan!” Rachel grabbed him in a tight hug.

Cable had appeared out of what appeared to be thin air. “I said that I’d find you, Rach. And it would be bad form if I showed up to the game late.”

Scott shook his hand. “How are you, Nathan?”

“I’m well.” He returned the handshake and fell in line as the three made their way towards the turnstiles at the entrance to the stadium. “Rooting out A.I.M nests in the South Pacific. Partnering with Deadpool. They used some of Sinister’s old technology. We dealt with it.” He paused for a second. “I heard about Mom. I’m sorry I missed the funeral.”

Scott nodded, tightly. There was still a lump in his throat whenever anyone brought her up.

“Wait a second,” Rachel told them, trying to change the topic. She reached into the back pocket of her jeans. “I’ve got your tickets. You probably should have those to get in.”

“We could call it an infiltration exercise?” Cable smiled. “It shouldn’t be that hard to break through whatever they pretend to call security.”

“Can we pretend that we aren’t X-Men for a day, Nathan?” Rachel handed him and Scott their tickets. “Normalcy, if it’s possible.”

Nathan waved his hand at the three of them.

Rachel laughed, quietly. “Okay, it might be a lost cause.”

They made their way into the stadium proper, as people started to make their way to their seats. “Rachel,” Scott asked, “where are we sitting?”

She didn’t respond for a second.

“Rachel?”

“Oh!” She shook her head with a start. “Sorry. There’s a lot of people, hard to keep all their thoughts out. Sorry. We’re out by first base. Near the field.”

“What,” Nathan asked, laughingly, “afraid my aged eyes wouldn’t be good enough?”

“Oh, shush.”

Scott rapped him on the metal arm, lightly. “Play nice, Nathan.”

“Feeling paternal, Slym?”

Scott raised his eyebrows under his glasses. “I babysit Logan, Emma and Kitty all day. Compared to that, the post-apocalyptic future was a treat.”

“Wasn’t the me there all old?” Rachel asked, as they went down the stairs, towards their section. “That’s what you told me when you were rescuing me from the even farther future.”

“Yep,” Nathan nodded. “You – Mother Askani – were the Charles Xavier of our little band of resisters.”

“Did I age gracefully, at least?”

Scott looked towards Nathan. “Dayspring Askani’son, I think you need to answer this one.”

“What? That badly?”

Cable shot Scott a dirty look. “You were already two hundred or so years old when either of us got there. You kept the tattoos, though.”

“Eh.” She shrugged. “Live fast, die for a short period of time before being resurrected by a cosmic force.”

“Don’t joke about that,” Scott said.

They got to the top of the section, as the band for the national anthem came out. Scott motioned towards the seats. “I’ll get us some beer, if you two want to sit down. If you’re all drinking, that is.”

They both nodded. “I bodyslid in,” Cable said. “I wouldn’t complain if you got drinks.”

Scott nodded, and made his way into line as the Star-Spangled Banner started playing. He didn’t bother to sing along or even take off his ballcap. Make no mistake, the Summers were an old Air Force family, but there were only so many times that the American government could send robots to kill him and his friends before his patriotism was dimmed. Captain America had less appeal when the CIA was funding mutant experimentation programs.

To be fair, this principle stand earned him a few dirty looks, but just a few.

“What would you like?” The cashier brought Scott back to focus.

Scott raised three fingers, and nodded towards the beers, and tossed a few dollars over. “Keep the change.” Grabbing the drinks, Scott craned his heads, and seeing that neither of his kids were waiting, he made a quick circuit throughout the section of the stadium. Two emergency exits, a scattering of security cameras, mostly fake, and a bank of windows that would splinter easily under the weight of an optic blast. Not good, in a combat situation or a rapid evacuation, but good enough.

He raised his communicator, to call in a sensor sweep from one of Forge and Hank’s satellites, and then paused.

Scott shook his head. The whole point of this was to put Cyclops aside for a second. And there were two powerful telekines a stone’s throw away. It would be fine.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was lying to himself.

By the time that he returned to the stadium seats, the first pitch had been thrown and the Mariners had already earned their first out.

“Did I miss anything?” Scott scooted past Nathan and Rachel, taking the far seat of the three. “And your drinks.”

“Not a thing.” Nathan shook his head as he telekineticed the top of the bottle off. “A ball, two strikes, pop fly to centerfield.”

“Since when do you know baseball?” Rachel looked at him up and down, while she TK’d her own bottle cap. “Doesn’t scream ‘Cable’ to me.”

He leaned back with a knowing smile. “Check the roster for the St. Louis Browns, in 1933. I had a very respectable batting average.”

“You didn’t!” Rachel leaned forward. “Dad, let me open that for you.” She waved Nathan on and TK’d Scott’s beer. “What was that story?”

“This was . . . thirty years ago, maybe? Ship’s AI had alerted me to a downstream temporal incident, and—”

Scott interrupted, for a second. “Wait, Ship is with you?”

Cable nodded. “It’s my AI. I’ve got a copy downloaded in my arm. I can—”

“Get back to the story, Nathan.” Rachel waved him on. “You can go on about that some other time.”

“Right.” He took a long drink from his beer. “So, there was a Trask descendant playing in the timestream, trying to infect the Human Torch – the first one – with nanosentinels. Something like that. I narrowed down Trask’s attack to a 1943 ballgame, so I infiltrated the team, drew him out with a temporal beacon, and – wham!” He punctuated it with a whack on the seat in front of him. “Mission complete.”

Scott took a drink of his own. “Good tactics.”

“That’s all you have to say?” Rachel leaned forwards, incredulously, in her seat. “I want to know how you hit with the whole metal arm.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Feel free to drop a comment.


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